WILLIAM STUBBS
Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history
and kindred subjects
page 63

III.] LOCAL STUDIES.
grow. It is an increasing pursuit both in America and in England, and., certainly helps, by the promotion of careful investigation and by the publication of recondite memorials, the more complete adjustment of personal and local details. This has no doubt helped largely the work of the Manuscripts Commission ; it has enabled the learned societies to attempt larger and more costly works, and has been the portal by which many, destined and qualified to be valuable historical helpers, have entered the field of historic study.
Local history and minute archaeology have been of use in the same way : the Harleian Society has published heraldic visitations ; the local societies have printed subsidy rolls and old legal memoranda ; old county histories have been republished ; little popular county histories are found in every farm-house in the country, where the editors or compilers have contrived, by mingling the utile of the directory with the duke of historic memoranda, to stimulate the curiosity of every class.
I have called this a revival, and so it is ; these pursuits do not seem to admit of much development, one flourishes and another languishes, as may be traced very clearly in the pages of the Archasologia ; twenty years ago architectural antiquities were the great object of local study, now through a genealogical period we are perhaps working our way to a constitutional one, which I shall be most happy to welcome. I think that just now, when so many of our most ancient institutions, the manorial system and the ecclesiastical and civil judicature of old times, are either falling into desuetude or being ruthlessly abolished, it would be a good work for local zeal to put on record what memory and custom can still supply as to the working of these old institutions. I wish to see a manorial map of England as it exists now or as it existed twenty years ago, reflecting as it must do the condition of territorial power at the time when it became impossible

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